Improving Your IT Help Desk

Offices are usually packed full of the latest technologies, whether it’s computers and their peripherals, printers, photocopiers, digital radios or projector screens; they always seem to have plenty of technology kicking about and when something goes wrong it can be a disaster. With no machines to work on, productivity drops to zero and people are running around in a panic wondering how they’ll ever recover the work they spent three-hours doing without hitting save (back-up people come on, you know how important it is!)

At times like these many offices only have one solution and that is to call the person tasked with being the “IT support guy” who has to drop their own tasks and come to the rescue. It’s often outside his or her job description to do these kind of tasks and they often fall behind on their own work because of it, yet due to their being no specific IT help desk in the office the company has no choice. However, there are a number of ways in which you could improve your unofficial help desk without having to create your own in-house department.

The key to running a successful help desk is to keep everything moving as efficiently as possible to ensure that everybody can keep to their schedules and deadlines without too much upheaval. However, with the increasing number of businesses encouraging bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policies whereby staff are allowed to bring their own machines into the office to work on, it can be difficult to keep everything running smoothly because of the various systems, processes and operating systems being used across the office as opposed to the same Hewlett Packard machine running Windows 8, for example.

To try and counter the various issues faced by those unofficially running the IT support section of the business, many have begun to implement software as a service (SaaS) to run it for them. SaaS is essentially the licensing of specific software designed to perform certain tasks such as organising the payroll within large companies and managing help desks through a central server which will reduce the amount of manpower – and time – taken to resolve the problems that occur within the business. Doing it this way means that the people required to manually repair computers or to perform software updates can do so without having to deal with minor, less essential jobs which take up their valuable time, which can be resolved by those managing the software externally instead.

It isn’t the kind of process that allows you to just say “here you go, take care of this”, it is a piece of cloud-based software that will need to be deeply considered before you invest. Like any business decision you need to consider whether or not it is important for the business at the current time, or something that could wait. If you have reached the decision that help desk software is the option for you then making a clear and concise plan as to how it will be implemented and brought out across the business will be essential if it is to be successful.
Various employees will be set in their ways with the “I’ve been doing it this way for years” approach, and may not take kindly to having to contact a computer to resolve their issues. They may also be unsure as to who handles what problem, asking the in-house team to resolve something that the software could do and vice versa, so getting the system to work on small, non-essential tasks would make sense while the in-house support team could work on software updates and restoring crashed systems. Developing a plan of action that is easy to understand is therefore vital.